Sandra Bem

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Sandra Bem (born June 22, 1944 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, as Sandra Ruth Lipsitz , died on May 20, 2014 in Ithaca , New York) was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who pioneered the research of gender studies , gender roles and has done androgyny . Bem gained notoriety beyond science through a portrait of her egalitarian marriage to Daryl J. Bem , which was published in the US magazine Ms. in 1972 . In the same year, Bem was part of a court case against the telecommunications group AT&T as an expert , which was widely publicized due to the high arbitration sum. The article The Last Day of Her Life , published posthumously in the New York Times, sheds light on the end of her life, which was marked by her Alzheimer's disease. At the age of 69 years she committed in the presence of her husband's suicide .

biography

Allderdice High School

Sandra Ruth was than older of two daughters in the district of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh in an Orthodox Jewish born household. Your sister's name is Beverly. Her parents, Peter and Lilian, were from the working class : Lilian was a secretary , Peter was a postman . The family lived in a council flat . Sandra attended Taylor Allderdice High School . According to Sandra Bems own memories, her mother warned her that “housework is not very desirable”. The social psychologist Meghan George, co-founder of Psychology's Feminist Voices , suspects this statement to be a trend-setting character that has shaped his biography: Bem began to express her conviction of gender equality early on . She began to learn just as early that society was not very tolerant of egalitarian ideas. Even in elementary school she refused to wear the skirts required as school attire and insisted on pants; for this she was almost expelled from school.

In the years that followed, her growing up was shaped by conflicts with her parents, and in Bems' diaries she describes quarrels with her mother, in which she "often threw objects on the walls".

Since Sandra Bem could not afford to leave home, she enrolled in the Institute of Technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and continued to live with her parents. At that time there was still the "Margaret Morrison Carnegie College" at Carnegie Mellon University, which was reserved exclusively for women. She earned there in 1965, a Bachelor of Science degree in developmental psychology (developmental psychology) and switched on for a short time at the Indiana University . Shortly after moving away, Bems maternal grandfather died, so that Bems mother was exposed to great stress. Sandra Bem returned to Pittsburgh and studied again at Carnegie University.

Daryl Bem, 1983

In 1965, Sandra Bem's roommate introduced her to the new assistant professor for psychology, Daryl Bem. Sandra and Daryl married four months after they had met. Since Sandra had not yet reached the age of 21 at this time, she had to obtain her parents' consent for the marriage. They were disappointed that no Jewish wedding ceremony was sought. Sandra wrote a letter to her father about this, the marriage took place a little later with an unconventional ceremony in the presence of her family:

“I have never before, during the course of my adult life, felt the need to justify my actions to anyone but myself, and I do not feel that need now. I am an intelligent, educated young woman, well aware of my strengths as well as my weaknesses ”

“Never before, in all of my adult life, have I seen the need to justify myself to anyone but myself - and I don't see it now. I am an intelligent, educated young woman, aware of my strengths as well as my weaknesses. "

- Sandra Ruth Lipsitz

After the marriage, Sandra's sister Beverly, who was six years her junior, lived with her for several years because her parents' marriage was "unhappy".

The egalitarian division of housework and career compromises in favor of the relationship was portrayed in the 1972 article "A Marriage of Equals" in the feminist magazine Ms. After the wedding, Sandra Bem moved to Ann Arbor , Michigan, to complete her postgraduate studies, while her husband stayed at Carnegie-Tech. After earning her PhD in Developmental Psychology in 1967, she moved back to Pittsburgh and also began working at her husband's university. At that time she was already an expert on discrimination against women in professional life. In Pittsburgh, she began researching gender-discriminatory job advertisements, which qualified her as an expert in the National Organization for Women (NOW) trial against the Pittsburgh Press , which began in 1969 . The Pittsburgh Press offered two categories of job advertisements at the time: Male help wanted and Female help wanted . The category targeting men had many more ads. The category for women only contained a few advertisements, plus activities that were considered “typical for women”. Sandra Bem conducted a study to determine whether women were more likely to apply for an offer aimed at men if the ads were sorted alphabetically instead of categorized by gender. Bems study proved this, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 1973 with five to four votes against this discriminatory practice of the Pittsburgh Press . As a result, newspapers across the country changed this previously common practice.

"The miracle of that decision is that within a year almost all newspapers across the country changed their classified ads."

"The miraculous thing about this ruling was that within a year, almost every newspaper in the United States changed the categorization of their ads."

- Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation

After three years of teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, both Daryl and Sandra Bem got an offer to transfer to Stanford University , which they both accepted. Bem continued researching gender and sexuality , but was denied the tenure track . Both spouses then moved to Cornell University , where they stayed until retirement.

After returning to the east coast of the United States, Sandra and Daryl separated amicably in 1994. Daryl began a homosexual relationship with another professor, but remained in friendship with Sandra and was a weekly guest. Sandra Ruth Lipsitz Bem had been separated from her husband Daryl Bem for around 15 years in the year of her diagnosis, 2009. Daryl was with Sandra Bem during the last months of her life. Sandra Ruth Lipsitz Bem and Daryl Bem have two children together: Emily (* 1974) and Jeremy (* 1976). The Bem family raised their children in a “gender-neutral way”: Jeremy, for example, wore pink clothes to kindergarten, Emily was regularly driven past a certain construction site because a woman worked there. The Bems organized their everyday family life using a calendar in which the “parent on duty” was entered on a weekly basis.

Illness and suicide

Sandra Bem experienced since about 2007, what they call "cognitive oddities" (cognitive curiosities) called. Occasionally she confused terms and was sometimes unable to name everyday objects with any certainty. The suspicion of a neurodegenerative disease arose for her through the HBO documentary program The Alzheimer's Project, which was first broadcast in May 2009 and seen by Bem. A simple memory test is shown in the documentation as part of an Alzheimer's diagnosis. Bem tried to complete this test spontaneously - and failed. She was unable to remember three terms before reproducing them she found the sentence I was born in Pittsburgh. ("I was born in Pittsburgh.") Wrote down.

Shortly thereafter, Daryl Bem accompanied her to her neuropsychological assessment at the University Hospital of Rochester , where the initial diagnosis of "mild cognitive impairment" was made by doctor Mark Mapstone. The investigation included repainting a line after a few minutes had passed, remembering a list of words, and sorting numbers and letters according to a given order. Bem said she was relieved when she learned the mild gradation in her diagnosis. When she learned that most of the "mild cognitive impairments" would develop into full Alzheimer's disease within ten years, Sandra Bem vowed to find a way to self-determined death.

"[With Alzheimer's desease it is] extraordinarily difficult for one's body to die in tandem with the death of one's self."

"With Alzheimer's disease, it is extremely difficult for your own body to form a tandem with the death of your own self."

- Sandra Ruth Lipsitz Bem

Sandra Bem began to document the course of her illness and the effects on her life in a diary. She describes her impairment as “maddening capriciousness” (unbearable, maddening arbitrariness) .

"[A] mind that could be so alive one moment with thought and feeling building toward a next step and then someone erases the blackboard. It's all gone and I can't even reconstruct what the topic was. It's just gone. And I sit with the dark, the blank. "

“The mind, in a moment so full of thoughts and the feeling of working towards the next step - and then someone wipes the board. Everything is gone and I can't even remember what the subject was. It's just gone. And I remain with the darkness, the void. "

- Sandra Ruth Lipsitz Bem

Six months before her suicide , Sandra Bem stopped all medication and bought a copy of The Peaceful Pill Handbook , a work on assisted suicide written by Philip Nitschke and Fiona Stewart. When her sister Beverly was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the family had conversations about suicide, as the state of Oregon - Beverly's place of residence - permits assisted suicides for people with a fatal illness. On May 20, 2014, she died by suicide in the presence of her husband.

Act

Sandra Bem became a pioneer in gender studies through her research . She took a feminist position that rejected or broke with gender stereotypes.

Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, retrospectively rates Sandra (and Daryl) Bem's work as follows:

“We didn't have a lot of studies back then. At that time, they were pioneers. They argued that sex stereotyping was started at a very young age and created an unequal playing field for girls and women. Their research was widely used and very influential. "

“We didn't have a lot of studies back then. At that time, they [the Bems] were pioneers. They discussed that gender stereotypes began in early childhood and led to an unbalanced playing field for girls and women. Their findings were widespread and very influential. "

- Eleanor Smeal

Cheryl Kasson also remembers Sandra Bem on Medium.com as a “first-rate psychologist”. During her studies in Women's Studies , Bem was considered an important figure in the history of psychology and the second wave of feminism .

The Bem Sex Role Inventory developed by Sandra Bem is still one of the most widely used questionnaires to record masculine and feminine personality traits.

Several of her scientific publications deal with the review of psychological knowledge and theories that were often formulated by men. In her paper Genital Knowledge and Gender Constancy in Preschool Children , published in 1989 in the specialist journal Child Development , Bem criticizes the paradigm that followed from Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget , according to which children of preschool age are not able, due to their cognitive development, to identify genders via altered physical appearance and to recognize their perception. According to Piaget, children of this age are in the stage of preoperational intelligence , in which gender would be derived from salient features such as hairstyle and clothing - but not from the idea that a person's gender and appearance can be independent of one another.

Between 1978 and 1985 led Bem the then newly created course Women's studies (women's studies) and was then in the years from 2001 director of the newly-named program "feminist, gender and sexuality studies".

Her book The Lenses of Gender , published in 1993, was described as "groundbreaking" by the New York Times .

In 2000, Bem became a psychotherapist ; she ran a part-time practice for ten years. She worked at Cornell University until she retired .

Bem Sex Role Inventory

The psychological tool Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) developed by Sandra Bem was published by her in 1974. The BSRI is a questionnaire to record the self-concept for gender roles; thereby be masculine and feminine personality characteristics measured. Masculinity and femininity are two independent dimensions, so people can have high scores for both - which Sandra Bem called androgyny . The BSRI basically differentiates between masculine and feminine with above-average masculine or feminine characteristics, undifferentiated with below-average masculine or feminine characteristics, or androgynous , provided that both masculine and feminine characteristics are above average. Bem's hypothesis was that androgynous individuals were at their highest mental health . This hypothesis received little support in the following research, which Alexandra Fleischmann and Monika Sieverding in the Dorsch Lexicon of Psychology regard in connection with a possible masculine bias . However, Meghan George of Psychology's Feminist Voices also notes that the Bem Sex Role Inventory was "often" difficult to reproduce. The theoretical background and the validity of the BSRI had also been the subject of "some" debate.

There is also a German version and a short form of the BSRI, which were published in 1981. The BSRI consists of 20 items for masculinity and femininity, plus 20 additional items that form a scale for social desirability .

The Lenses of Gender

The book The Lenses of Gender, Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality was published in 1993. Over six sections, the book deals with what Bem describes as three basic beliefs about women and men : The view is polarizing, i.e. under the premise that both sexes are fundamentally different in nature with regard to psychology and sexuality. According to Bem, all differences are maximized, people are artificially dichotomized . The androcentric thought that men are by nature the dominant or superior sex. And that differences between men and women as well as male dominance would be natural-genetic, biologically essential.

Bems intention was to highlight how discourses focused on masculinity interpret the differences between men and women to the detriment of women. She argues that an awareness of these paradigms that influence all experience must be reflected in order to enable a cultural discourse on gender .

“Bem argues convincingly that all three lenses both distort and shape reality. [...] A thought-provoking study, bringing together many social, biological, and political theories into a well-reasoned volume. "

“Bem convincingly demonstrates that all three lenses both distort and shape reality. […] A thought provoking analysis in which many social, biological and political theories are brought together in a well thought-out book. "

- Kirkusrevies.com

Kirkusreviews.com describes Bem's position that children should be given the opportunity to develop their own position in the spectrum of gender identities as controversial . In The Lenses of Gender , Bem also looks at constructs like tomboy and tune and takes up thoughts of the non-binary understanding of gender .

Awards

Sandra Bem has received several awards:

Publications (selection)

paper

  • SL Bem, DJ Bem: Training the Woman to Know Her Place: The Social Antecedents of Women in the World of Work . 1973.
  • SL Bem, DJ Bem: Does sex-biased job advertising "aid and abet" sex discrimination? In: Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 3, 1973, pp. 6-18.
  • SL Bem: The measurement of psychological androgyny. In: Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology . 42, 1974, pp. 155-162.
  • SL Bem: Gender schema theory: A cognitive account of sex typing. In: Psychological Review. 88, 1981, pp. 354-364.
  • SL Bem: Gender schema theory and its implications for child development: Raising gender-aschematic children in a gender-schematic society. In: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Signs 8, 1983, pp. 598-616.
  • SL Bem: Genital Knowledge and Gender Constancy in Preschool Children. In: Child Development. Vol. 60, Issue 3, 1989, p. 649. doi: 10.2307 / 1130730

Others

About the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission vs. AT&T with a detailed description of the expert statement by Sandra Bems:

  • Marjorie A. Stockford: The Bellwomen: The Story of the Landmark AT&T Sex Discrimination Case. Rutgers University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8135-3428-3 .

Obituaries

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Torsten Ove: Obituary: Sandra Bem / Psychologist, feminist, pioneer in gender roles. In: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette . May 23, 2014. (post-gazette.com , accessed September 17, 2019)
  2. ^ A b c M. George: Profile of Sandra Bem. In: A. Rutherford (Ed.): Psychology's Feminist Voices Multimedia Internet Archive. 2014. (feministvoices.com , accessed August 15, 2019)
  3. ↑ a b c d e Robin Marantz Henig: The Last Day of Her Life. In: The New York Times . May 14, 2015. Retrieved September 13, 2019. (nytimes.com)
  4. ↑ Review. (kirkusreviews.com , Retrieved September 13, 2019)
  5. ↑ Cheryl Kasson: Remembering Sandra Bem. October 28, 2015. (medium.com , accessed September 21, 2019)
  6. ↑ a b c Alexandra Fleischmann, Monika Sieverding: Bem Sex Role Inventory. In: Dorsch - Lexicon of Psychology . (portal.hogrefe.com , accessed August 15, 2019)
  7. ^ SL Bem: Genital knowledge and gender constancy in preschool children. In: Child Development. 60 (3) 1989, pp. 649-662. PMID 2737014 .
  8. ^ The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. Yale University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-300-05676-1 . (jstor.org , Retrieved September 24, 2019)
  9. ^ Anne Murphy: Theological Trends: The Lenses of Gender. theway.org. Retrieved September 25, 2019.
  10. ↑ Review. ( accessed September 25, 2019 from kirkusreviews.com )
  11. ^ Sandra Lipsitz Bem (1944-2014). PMID 25844652 . Retrieved September 25, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Bem, Sandra
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bem, Sandra Ruth Lipsitz; Lipsitz, Sandra Ruth (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychologist and pioneer in gender studies
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 2014
Place of death Ithaca , New York